


Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle

by ladivvinatravestia



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Background Relationships, F/F, Fade to Black, Heteronormativity, Implied Sexual Content, Internalized Sexism, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, the red room's A+ parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 04:12:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17911775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladivvinatravestia/pseuds/ladivvinatravestia
Summary: Natasha finds she doesn’t have to make anything up to have shared life experiences with Sharon.





	Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [englishghosts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishghosts/pseuds/englishghosts) for the beta.
> 
> Additional warnings:
> 
> An older character refers to Steve as “gay” when he has identified himself as bisexual. Steve is not present for the conversation.
> 
> The characters believe the story ends on a happy note, but the last scene of the fic is the first scene of CA:TWS so you know things get a little shaky before everyone can have their happily ever after.

It’s a slow day at the office, which means they are all actually at the office, instead of out saving the world or doing training exercises or PT. In point of fact, they are all in Sitwell’s office, gossiping - no, thinks Natasha, it’s mostly men, who would insist that they are “shooting the shit”, because men "don’t gossip". Sitwell himself has tried to shoo them out, on the pretence that he has paperwork, but Natasha can see his computer screen and he’s ordering tickets to the ballet and a generous bouquet of flowers.

“Oh, that’s right,” says Rumlow, who can also see the screen. “V-Day is coming up.” He leans back in his chair and puts his arm around Rollins’ shoulders. “Anybody else have big plans?”

Natasha does not. She deflects the question by asking, “What are your plans?”

Rumlow smiles. “Wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise for Rollins here,” he laughs, and punches Rollins on the arm. Rollins punches right back. Natasha wonders if that’s how they show affection for each other in private, too. It seems to work for them, though. Later, much later, Natasha will wonder whether she should have known then and there that there was something more sinister going on.

Steve says, “There’s a dessert potluck in my building.”

“Ooh,” says Rumlow, “maybe you can get to know that cute nurse a little better.”

Steve leans back in his chair and runs his fingers through his hair. “How does everyone know about the cute nurse?” he complains.

Natasha and Sitwell trade complicit glances.

Rollins laughs and says, “Come on, Cap, you don’t know how to talk to pretty girls?”

“I don’t _want_ to talk to pretty girls,” grumps Steve.

“Cap is America’s Most Eligible Bisexual,” Mercer points out, picking up the People magazine on Sitwell’s desk that proclaims him to be so and waving it in the air. “Maybe he wants to talk to hot guys?”

“No,” objects Steve.

“He doesn’t know how to talk to those, either,” says Rollins.

“Yeah, that’s because there aren’t any around here for him to practice on,” Mercer shoots back, and Rumlow and Rollins cry out in mock outrage. That is, finally, enough for Sitwell, who stands up to shoo them from his office.

“Out!” he says, “unlike the rest of you jokers, I have an actual romantic evening to plan.”

 ~~

As they’re drifting towards the parking garage later in the day, Steve says to Natasha,

“So, your Valentine’s Day plans?”

One of the reasons Natasha likes Steve is that he respects her abilities on and off the field without her needing to keep up the sexpot mystique. She draws herself up to her full height, which still leaves Steve towering over her.

“Liho and I,” she says grandly, “are going to eat takeaway sushi and binge-watch the Adam West _Batman_.”

“You could come with me to the potluck,” Steve suggests, giving her his best hopeful-puppy expression.

Natasha would much rather watch TV with her cat, but SHIELD’s psychologists are concerned that Steve isn’t “moving on” or “adjusting to his new life”, and Natasha is supposed to be encouraging him to socialize more, so she guesses this is an opportunity she should take.

“You want me to protect you from the cute nurse?” she teases.

“No, I want you to protect me from all the older ladies who have a niece or a stepdaughter they think I’d get along really well with,” says Steve.

“Why?” asks Natasha, though she feels a twinge of conscience that maybe she shouldn’t be pushing Steve to get back in the dating game quite as hard as the psychologists seem to think is advisable. “Nothing wrong with getting out there and meeting a couple of people for coffee or something, it’s not like you have to get engaged to someone on the first date.”

“Natasha,” says Steve, “Bucky and I were together for ten years before -” he breaks off suddenly and looks away.

Natasha curses inwardly, wondering if he’s bothered to share that detail with any of the psychologists.

“Okay, sorry,” she says. “I’ll come scare off all the matchmakers. Just don’t expect me to bring anything homebaked.”

 ~~

Steve is a fashion disaster, so Natasha decides to text Sharon to find out what the dress code is likely to be for the party.

 _I don’t know, business casual?_ Sharon texts back.

And then, a few minutes later, _Hold on, you’re not coming “with” Rogers, are you?_

 _Hah! No_ , responds Natasha. _I’m coming to save him from all the matchmakers._

 _Good,_ Sharon responds, almost immediately.

Natasha takes a minute to process this. _If you’re thinking that means he’s still available for you to go after, he just told me he’s still off the market,_ she texts.

Three little dots appear on Natasha’s screen, indicating that Sharon is typing something. They blink back and forth for a few moments, then disappear and reappear several more times before a response finally comes through.

 _He’s not really my type_ , Sharon says.

That could mean a lot of things, Natasha realizes, but it would be short-sighted of her to assume that she’s not being flirted with. Huh.

 ~~

Natasha chooses a modest sweater-dress and leggings, something she’d worn in her time as “Natalie from Legal”. Nothing too intimidating, nothing too overtly sexy. She’s not there to make any impressions on anyone, just to provide Steve with extraction assistance if he gets stuck in conversations he doesn’t want to be in.

Steve meets her at the door to his building and leads her down to the common room in the basement, which looks like it hasn’t been updated since the 1970s. Steve himself looks like he got dressed in the 1940s, and Natasha makes a mental note that maybe she can help him start to “adjust to his new life” by taking him shopping for outfits more like what most men in their 20s are wearing in 2014.

“Steve!” says an older woman in a shapeless animal-print dress, coming up to greet Steve and Natasha at the door. “So nice of you to join us!”

She reaches up to give Steve a hug, which he patiently submits to.

“And, ooh, who’s your friend?” the woman continues.

Steve introduces her as Linda, the head of the building’s social committee, and does his best to emphasize to Linda that Natasha is just a friend from work. Natasha can already tell that Linda has made up her mind there’s more to the relationship than that.

Then Sharon is at the door, and Natasha can see from Linda’s expression that she’s expecting a bit of a cat fight. Maybe even looking forward to one.

Steve opens his mouth to start making introductions and Natasha decides to squash all expectations and hopes for drama.

“Oh, we’ve already met,” she says, and goes in to hug Sharon. “Kate, it’s so nice to see you again!” she says.

“Natasha!” says Sharon, returning the hug. She’s wearing polka-dot cigarette pants and a blouse in some kind of silky material and Natasha should probably stop hugging her now.

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” says Steve. Linda looks disappointed.

“We were in a spin class together,” says Natasha. With her training, lying comes easily to her, but she can’t help feeling a little bad that she needs to be lying to Steve about who Sharon is and how they know each other.

But then Steve says “Spin class,” in a tone of voice so loaded Natasha can see the quotation marks around the words, and she suddenly knows without question that Sharon’s cover has been made.

“Right,” says Linda brightly, oblivious, and claps her hands. “Let’s get all of your potluck contributions on the buffet table, and then you can introduce Natasha to all of our other guests.”

Natasha, Steve, and Sharon follow Linda to the sideboard, where Steve sets out some kind of brown thing in a brown casserole dish that looks - very homebaked.

“Ooh, bread pudding,” says one of the other guests, another woman past middle age who is wearing a white dress shirt, red pullover, and crisply-pressed khakis that are an exact match for those worn by her husband. “Steve, did you bake this yourself?”

“Yes,” says Steve, ducking his head and turning pink. “My ma’s recipe.”

Natasha and Sharon trade glances and by unspoken agreement they pull their dishes out of their plastic bags at the same time as each other.

“Awkward,” comments Sharon, as she sees Natasha’s contribution. They have both brought exactly the same package of heart-shaped sugar cookies from Safeway.

Red pullover woman, who Sharon eventually introduces as Barbara, clicks her tongue in disapproval. Her husband engages Steve in discussion of a recent baseball game, which seems safe enough for Steve, but that leaves Barbara free to voice her opinions to Sharon and Natasha.

“So, how did you meet Steve?” she starts.

Natasha doesn’t want to have to deal with the kind of reaction she tends to get when she reveals her actual profession, or even her cover profession as a lawyer, so she goes with a nice, non-committal, “Oh, we work together.”

“You girls these days,” says Barbara, “you work so hard you don’t have any time left over for the important things. Do you really think Steve is going to want to date a girl who can’t put a home cooked meal on the table for him?”

Natasha glances at Sharon, whose eyebrows have climbed almost to her hairline.

“Oh, hey, look,” she says, “here come Mike and Dave, Natasha, let me introduce you to them.”

She reaches for Natasha’s hand and leads her over to the couple who’ve just entered the room, men in their late 30s or early 40s in nice dress shirts and jeans.

“Sorry, there’s a lot of that kind of attitude around here,” mutters Sharon as they walk, and Natasha says,

“I’m a hundred percent certain that’s not the first thing Steve looks for in a woman.”

“If Aunt Peg is any indication of his taste,” Sharon agrees, “he’s probably looking for how good her hand-to-hand combat skills are.”

Sharon introduces Natasha to Mike and Dave as, “This is Natasha, she works with Steve,” but they recognize her anyway.

“Hey, you’re the Black Widow, right?” says Dave.

“My codename is classified,” Natasha tries, but it turns out they don’t even really care about that.

“So we have this friend Dan, we think he’d get along really well with Steve, do you think you could put in a good word for him?” asks Mike.

“You realize I have to do a background check on everyone who wants to date Steve before they’re allowed to meet him,” lies Natasha.

More guests trickle in to the party and Sharon and Natasha mingle with them, Natasha keeping an eye on Steve to make sure he isn’t getting cornered. Right now he seems to be talking to Mike and Dave about some cooking show, and he gives her a subtle thumbs-up when she catches his eye.

The party carries on, and Natasha only has to extract Steve from one conversation - not an attempt to fix him up with a date but a discussion with a pregnant couple in their mid-20s in high-end designer outfits they could have achieved at the thrift store for under twenty dollars apiece.

“What’s so hard to understand about herd immunity?” Steve mutters as she pulls him away. “Vaccines are the best thing to come out of the twentieth century!” She leaves him with Linda and another woman of about the same age in a conversation about container gardening, then drifts back over to where Sharon is talking to a tiny old woman in a cardigan and sweatpants, her hair an even more improbable shade of red than Natasha’s own. When Natasha joins the conversation, the woman is enumerating all of her current medical complaints, but soon she’s taking Natasha’s hand and patting it consolingly.

“It’s too bad Steve turned out to be gay, but don’t worry, you two gals will find nice young men to take care of you some day,” she says.

Sharon and Natasha trade glances and this time it’s Natasha’s turn to raise her eyebrows to her hairline.

“Mrs. Nelson, it’s so kind of you to say that,” says Sharon, smiling sweetly and completely falsely. Natasha casts a glance around to see if she and Sharon can excuse themselves for whatever conversation Steve is in, but Steve is now nowhere to be seen.

“Target no longer in visual range,” she tells Sharon in an undertone, tugging her away from Mrs. Nelson anyway.

Sharon pulls out her phone and taps the screen a couple of times. “It’s okay,” she says after a moment, “he’s just gone back to his apartment.”

She holds her phone out for Natasha to see and they both lean in to look at the screen. Sharon is standing close enough to Natasha that her hair brushes Natasha’s shoulder and Natasha is now certain that she’s being flirted with. It is not, she decides, an unwelcome development. Steve puts his dirty casserole dish in the sink and foregoes rinsing it in favour of looking up defiantly at the camera in his kitchen ceiling.

“So he’s not perfect after all,” Natasha comments.

“Seriously, it’s a wonder he doesn’t have fruit flies,” says Sharon. “C’mon, let’s get out of here before we can be subjected to any more outdated assumptions about our value as people.”

 ~~

As Sharon is letting them into her apartment, she says, “ Don’t worry about my cover. He’s known about the cameras probably from day one. He figured out it was me some time this week, not sure how. I told Fury but you know how he likes his silos.”

Natasha nods. She does.

“I get so tired of all the assumptions about how I should act and what I should be looking for in life,” Sharon comments, kicking off her shoes and flopping down on her couch. Natasha joins her. Sharon’s couch is not that big. “You’re too young to be a nurse,” Sharon says, clearly quoting something that’s been said to her.

“You’re too pretty to be a lawyer,” Natasha echoes.

“You’ll feel different about children once you have your own,” says Sharon.

“You should smile more,” adds Natasha.

“Anyway,” says Sharon, “the Steve Rogers show is never very interesting in the evening, he usually reads and then goes to bed early. Wanna watch the Science Channel? There’s an _Animal Planet_ marathon.”

Natasha grabs another cookie and settles back into the cushions. Sharon isn’t quite so obvious as to pretend she is stretching so she can put her arm around Natasha, but she does pull an afghan up over both of their laps. All right. This is happening. This can happen. Sharon is…nice. And Natasha hasn't had to make anything up to find they have some shared life experiences.

Snacking on leftover cookies and watching _Animal Planet_ soon turns to huddling close to one another over Natasha’s phone so Natasha can show Sharon her hundred cutest pictures of Liho. Natasha leans much closer to Sharon than she strictly needs to in order to share the pictures. Then she’s letting Sharon take her phone out of her hands and push her back against the arm of the couch and this is not something Natasha normally does just for fun, but maybe she can give it a try.

She could, she supposes, ask herself whether Sharon has been given some directive from higher up to seduce her for some reason, but, as she is always reminding herself, there’s a point of diminishing returns in suspecting the motives of people who have been your allies for several years, and this is probably beyond it. Her personal safety isn’t at any greater risk than it is the rest of the time she’s going about her daily life, and there isn’t any intel she has to get or any objectives she needs to carry out. Which means she can focus on the objective that - well, okay, that normal people - focus on when they’re having sex: actually enjoying herself.

 ~~

As it turns out, Natasha enjoys herself very thoroughly, several times, and so does Sharon, before they finally stumble out of the shower together and into Sharon’s bed. Natasha grabs a few hours of sleep before getting re-dressed in the outfit she’d worn yesterday and letting herself quietly out of Sharon’s apartment. She assumes that she’ll be able to make a clean getaway, but as she’s pulling the door closed behind her, she discovers that 4:45 in the morning, a time that most people consider to be still the middle of the night, is a time that Steve goddamn Rogers thinks is perfectly reasonable to get up and go for his morning run, because here he is waiting for her on the landing, an amused twinkle in his eyes.

“Not one word, Rogers, or I will end you,” she hisses as they walk down the stairs.

“Please,” he says, “it’s not like casual sex was just invented in the twenty-first century. I’m glad you both had a good time.”

And then he holds the front door open for her, like the old-fashioned gentleman he is.

When they reconvene at the Triskelion later that morning, Rollins has a fading bite mark on his neck and Rumlow is walking with a telling hitch in his step. Rumlow body-checks Steve and says,

“So did you finally score with Nurse Hot Lips?”

“No,” says Steve, in a voice that invites no further conversation.

Rumlow and Rollins trade glances and then Rollins says, “Maybe Hot Lips is too old for him? Cap likes them barely-legal, at least if you believe the comics.”

“Yeah, your cute kid sidekick, what was his name, Buddy or something?” grins Rumlow.

“ _Bucky_ was a year older than me, and it wasn’t legal at all in those days,” says Steve shortly, before walking off.

“Widow?” Rollins says. “How was your V-Day?”

“Better than yours,” says Natasha with the most mysterious smile she can muster, and follows after Steve.

“Not a chance!” Rumlow calls after her cheerily.

She would have enjoyed her original plans, spending time alone with her cat, but she can’t deny that she had a good time with Sharon. Her training had been pretty thorough, but it had also taken place before texting had become the ubiquitous form of communication it now was. What’s the protocol for contacting someone you hooked up with to leave open the possibility of a second round? Does Natasha want a second round?

Before she can fully think it over, they’re called into a briefing about suspected A.I.M. activity on a couple of abandoned Roxxon rigs down in the Gulf of Mexico, a mission the team is being sent out on later the same day. Well. Better to keep her options open than to shut them down right away.

After texting her downstairs neighbour to look in on Liho, Natasha composes a series of texts to Sharon: _Thanks for last night. Heading out on mission for a couple days. Maybe we can get together and debrief when I get back?_

 _YES_ , Sharon texts back right away. Natasha decides not to examine whether that might be because she’s genuinely that interested in having sex with Natasha again, or because she’s genuinely that bored on Steve Rogers surveillance detail.

 ~~

The mission turns out to be a bust - any activity ceased and well cleared out by the time the team was able to get there, but somehow that still means that Natasha and the rest of the team have gone four days without a shower or a good night’s sleep by the time they’re on the quinjet back to D.C. She’s trying to remember whether she might have a can of soup left in her pantry that she can heat up when a text comes in from Sharon.

_I accidentally ordered way too much take-away, do you want to come over and help me eat it?_

_I’m kind of gross right now_ , Natasha texts back. Almost definitely not the sort of thing she should be texting someone she wants to hook up with again.

 _You can use my shower,_ Sharon offers. _I’ll put some pyjamas and socks in the dryer for you so they’re nice and warm._

Well, that is a hell of a lot better than going back to an empty apartment and Liho’s accusations of abandonment. _That sounds fantastic_ , Natasha replies.

True to her word, Sharon has freshly-warmed comfy clothes and a generous selection of souvlaki and dolmades waiting for Natasha when she gets out of the shower. Natasha sinks gratefully into Sharon’s couch and tucks her toes up under the afghan. Sharon turns on _Great British Ghosts_ and Natasha lets herself zone out for a bit while she eats. She’s feeling comfortable and content as she finishes off the last piece of baklava, but Sharon didn’t invite her here just so she could use up all the hot water and then eat all of Sharon’s food.

Natasha casts a glance from beneath lowered lashes at Sharon as she licks the last of the honey from her fingers, then shifts her weight on the couch so she’s further inside Sharon’s personal space. Sharon takes her up on the unspoken invitation, sitting up so she can put her arm around Natasha along the back of the couch. Natasha leans forward, parting her lips, but then Sharon abruptly pulls away.

“Oh, no, wait,” she says. “What am I doing? You just got back from a mission, you must be exhausted, we can fool around another time.”

“Uh,” says Natasha intelligently. Of all possible things she’s trained for, this kind of thing is not in her playbook. The mission is - no, there’s no mission. She won’t have failed the mission if she and Sharon don’t have sex tonight. Sharon doesn’t even seem to be expecting to have sex tonight. She’s seemingly happy with having taken care of Natasha when Natasha didn’t have the energy to do so for herself.

“Yeah, c’mon, let’s just go to bed,” says Sharon, standing up and offering Natasha a hand. Natasha must have let some of her surprise cross her face, because Sharon adds, “If you’re worried about ‘owing’ me, you can order the takeaway and warm up my socks the next time I’m coming back from a long shitty mission.”

 ~~

They don’t have sex that night, or even the next morning, because Natasha is called back in with the rest of the team to debrief, but Sharon texts her to come over that Friday and Natasha reminds herself this is not about paying off a debt. Does she still want to have sex with Sharon for fun? It turns out the answer is a definite yes. And from there, it becomes much easier to make the decision to head over to Sharon’s place when Sharon texts her, and even to take the initiative to text Sharon and invite herself over.

After Natasha lets herself out of Sharon’s apartment at 4:45 for the second time that week, four weeks in a row, Steve says,

“You know, in my day -”

“Shut it, Rogers,” Natasha interrupts, but Steve does not.

“When you were sweet on someone, you were supposed to get dressed up real nice and ask them out to dinner and a movie,” he says.

“What happened to ‘twenty-first century didn’t invent casual sex’?” Natasha counters.

“Twice a week for a whole month isn’t that casual,” Steve tells her. Natasha chews on that as they walk down the stairs. If she’s honest with herself, she’d known it wasn’t casual the minute she let Sharon take care of her after the Roxxon mission.

“Think about it,” Steve is saying. “Just ask Sharon - Kate, whoever she is, for coffee or something. It’s not like you have to get engaged to her on the first date.”

They’ve reached the street level entrance, and Natasha looks up at Steve. If she stays on the bottom step, she doesn’t have to look quite so far up. “How are _you_ giving _me_ romantic advice?” she asks him.

“Hey, I’m America’s Most Eligible Bisexual,” grins Steve, “I must know what I’m talking about.”

And with that, he takes off jogging.

Natasha stays on the bottom step, thinking. Sure, there has been sex, and the sex has been good. Fun. Sharon is certainly more focused on making sure Natasha also enjoys herself than any of Natasha’s male lovers have been. But there has also been - cooing over cute animals and mocking a series of terrible shows about the paranormal. Systematically sampling the cuisine of every take-away place in the neighbourhood. Cuddling together under blankets and commiserating about the dumb, sexist remarks that get thrown their way. This is, maybe, what an actual relationship is supposed to look like. Can Natasha do this? Well, she will never know if she doesn’t try. She heads back up the stairs and knocks on Sharon’s door.

When Sharon opens the door, she’s still in her pyjamas, hair mussed with sleep, and Natasha thinks, yes, she could get used to this.

“Oh hey, is everything okay?” Sharon asks.

Everything is not, precisely, okay. Natasha’s heart is suddenly in her throat, her stomach full of butterflies. She knows the feeling for an adrenaline reaction, even though she’s had one so rarely in her adult life. She tells herself it’s silly to feel this nervous - it’s not like anything critical is at stake here.

Except, maybe it is. She’s putting her own emotions on the line, deciding to trust someone else with her well-being in a non-combat situation. Something her own psychologist has been trying to convince her to do for a long time. Well. Maybe if she wants to help Steve start to adjust to his new life, she has to help herself first.

For once, she curses how thoroughly her training overwrote her ability to show her true emotions. If she adopts the body language of tentativeness now, Sharon will see it for the act it is. She will just have to be herself, as well as she knows how to do so.

“Sorry to wake you back up, but would you be interested in going for coffee and a movie some time?” she says. “Like on a real date?”

Sharon’s face brightens with a smile, even though she still looks rumpled and sleepy. “I would love to!” she says. And then she pulls Natasha in for a very thorough kiss before sending her on her way. “Let’s check the listings and then we can go see something this weekend, yeah?”

 ~~

Natasha is already planning how she will tell Steve about her upcoming date when she pulls up to pick him up from his run at the National Mall. When she gets there, he’s chatting with - no, with that body language, he’s definitely flirting with - a guy with really great legs in an Air Force sweatshirt. She checks the guy over and he appears to have a really great everything else, too. Then she catches Steve’s eye and cracks a joke, and he’s getting in the car, still scribbling stuff in that moleskine notebook he carries everywhere.

“So?” he says, raising his eyebrows expectantly.

“You first,” Natasha invites, as she drives off.

“I got that guy’s number,” says Steve. “Sam Wilson.”

Natasha says, “I’ll start running background checks on him.”

“Great,” says Steve, stubbornly refusing to rise to the bait. “Now what about you?”

“Well,” says Natasha slowly, wondering how long she can drag this out, “I thought about what you said, and then I went back upstairs to talk to Sharon, to ask her if she wanted to go on a real date some time - hold on -”

She finds a convenient time to break off her story for maximum suspense value as she makes a quick lane change to approach the Triskelion.

“Natasha -” Steve starts.

“Okay, okay,” Natasha relents. “We’re going to pick a movie to go to this weekend.”

And to her surprise, she’s able to put a genuine smile on her face when she says so. Her good mood lasts all the way up to when the team lands on the Lemurian Star.

**Author's Note:**

> Great British Ghosts really exists, I watched a lot of it while I was writing this fic, and it is not actually that terrible.
> 
> visit me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ladivvinatravestia)


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